"The Abandoned Cat" Author: [Japanese] Haruki Murakami Publisher: Huacheng Publishing House

Introduction
Haruki Murakami's new work in 2021 finally talks about his father, self, memories and cats. (ps: Read and recommend Murakami's new book essay collection "Murakami T" in 2022)
Some things will be forgotten with time, while some things will be brought up again by time.
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"One summer afternoon, my father and I went to the beach to abandon a cat."
The story begins and ends with a cat.
The little things in life connect the past of Murakami's family and his personal growth experience.
"It is the endless accumulation of these little things that have made me what I am today."
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Murakami calmly writes about his father's entire life, transforming the long estrangement, breakup and reconciliation between himself and his father into visible words, and unreservedly showing readers that the turmoil and fear his father experienced in his life have now become Murakami's confusion and uneasiness about the world.
Murakami also writes about real history, reflects on war, criticizes evil, thinks about the contradiction between the individual and the collective, and searches for the connection between a single life and world history.
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The identification of the meaning of self-existence, the gap between oneself and the world, the difficulty of inheriting family history, these root issues of Murakami's literature are all presented and answered in this book. This is the book of life that Murakami has spent most of his life brewing and finally wrote.
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"I worked my ass off to write it. It's my duty as a writer." - Haruki Murakami
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０ Some recommendations:
【Yan Lianke】
Haruki Murakami's "The Abandoned Cat" describes his father's life in plain words, which is full of ups and downs and deep and quiet lakes. Behind the eloquent words, there are too many blanks and unspoken words. This little book truly corresponds to Hemingway's "Iceberg Theory", one eighth of which is visible on the sea surface, and seven eighths are invisible under the sea. Rather than saying that "The Abandoned Cat When I Talk About My Father" is about the father, it is better to say that it is about the distant distance between the son and the father. This distance between father and son and the blank of the distance are Murakami's unspoken writing.
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【Zhi An】
This is the heaviest piece of Murakami Haruki's work that I have read, although it is not very long. The weight of history, the weight of reality, the weight of memory, and the weight of living as an individual are all precious and worth writing about.
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【Shi Hang】
It turns out that Murakami has a road that he cannot avoid in his life. He walks on this road of truth step by step with piety and calmness, which is more moving than his figure when he is running.
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【Li Jingze】
No one knows how an abandoned cat comes back. It is at home, but it is shut up inside itself, the wounds heal, but it grows inside the wounds.
Haruki Murakami directly compares his father to the abandoned cat. The Abandoned Cat is just an essay, but for Murakami, it is a book, a book about the fundamentals of his life.
Murakami kept looking at his father from afar. Did this man kill anyone? What had he been through?
In this kind of distant gaze, Murakami formed his attitude towards the world. It turns out that all his novels started from here. He could not trust or understand his world. His connection with his father was that he also became the abandoned cat returning from Kafka's seashore, always there and not there, always wandering within himself.
This novelist always tells stories about abandoned cats. He loves running, and this may be a subconscious physical reaction, the escape of an abandoned cat.
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【Zhu Yujie】
The memories begin with "abandoning a cat". "Abandoning a cat" is like a metaphor. No matter how unwilling one is to face the harsh reality, the cruel truth will always find its way home like a cat, attacking one's heart and existing in one's consciousness. This book is short and powerful. It takes the son's experience of searching for his deceased father as a clue. It reveals the cruelty of war from the affectionate family affection, reflects on the contradiction between the individual and the collective, and sighs at the contingency of history and human destiny. The haiku recited by the father is the romance in the life of ordinary people, driving away the sense of emptiness of life, and is the warmth in human nature that is unwilling to yield.
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Buckwheat
Summoning his father from the torrent of history and the gap between death is the most distant look back at himself and the sigh for the emptiness of life by the old Murakami.
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【Jiang Fangzhou】
There is a saying that "a sign of a person's aging is that he begins to look like his father." In this work, Haruki Murakami escapes into his father's body, sees with his father's eyes, and experiences with his father's soul. The sadness is doubly intense because the father and son share the same memories.
Proudly published by Motie Wenzhi Books
About the Author
[Japanese] Haruki Murakami
Born in Kyoto, Japan in 1949. He made his debut by winning the Gunzo Newcomer Literature Award with his debut novel "Hear the Wind Sing". He has published many subsequent works, covering novels, short stories, non-fiction, essays and other genres. Among them are the world-famous "Norwegian Wood", the in-depth documentary "Underground", "1Q84" which is praised as "a milestone in Japanese literature in the new millennium", and "Killing Commendatore" which talks about reflections on war.
His works are characterized by a concise style and rich interpretability, and have won many awards around the world, including the Tanizaki Junichiro Prize, the Mainichi Publishing Culture Prize, the Kafka Prize, and the Jerusalem Literature Prize.
Ye Yi
Graduated from the Japanese Department of Beijing Language and Culture University. Studied in Japan and taught Chinese courses at the local Confucius Institute. Currently works in the publishing industry. With a little bit of obsession, I walked a long way, but I didn't expect that obsession would gradually become a belief.
His translated works include "No Longer Human", "The Wind Rises", "Silver Spoon", "Me, the Bird and the Bell", "It Turns Out We Have None of Grown Up", etc.
Alichia